Fifty years after President Johnson signaled a new concern to Congress in carbon pollution, we know he was right. Fifty years from now, how will the next generation look back on us? Will they say that we dealt with a moral and technological challenge of our time?

I spent three months in the ABC Saigon Bureau in 1971, coming not from the States but from Moscow. An election was in progress. Vietnam had some 30 newspapers, all but one complaining that the voting was rigged, quite a contrast with the press in Soviet Russia.

It is a national disgrace that so many poor children live in the United States of America -- the world's richest economy. It doesn't have to be this way. It's costly. And it's the greatest threat to our future national, economic and military security.

In 1920 psychologist Edward Thorndike (1874 to 1949) coined the phrase, "The Halo Effect," which grew to define one's overall impression in his or her life --- of a person, a leader, a product, of absolutely anything -- as experienced only positively, with any neutral, conflicting or negative thoughts completely ruled out.

King was looking forward to attending a Passover Seder at Heschel's home that year, but he was assassinated a few weeks before the Jewish holiday. Heschel was the only Jew to deliver a eulogy at King's funeral service.

My greatest concern with the story told in the movie Selma is that it presents the final march from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Montgomery and the Voting Rights Act as a triumphant conclusion to the African American Civil Rights Movement. But history is much more complicated.

Many historians just see King as a "civil rights" leader, but they don't fully understand how being a minister and a faith leader made his role in the movement possible. Oyelowo believes, after the years of research into King and the civil rights movement, that King could not have led this movement had he not been a "man of faith."

What Johnson knew or worse authorized Hoover to do to thwart King will never be fully known. But as Selma pointed out, Hoover's gutter campaign against King happened on Johnson's watch, and he did nothing to stop it.

David helped to create the modern electoral process. He used television brilliantly; he helped introduce the slickness and trickery that is used by almost all political operatives as they seek to elect their candidates. He was smart, he was tough and for the last 30 years, he was my friend.

The widely-accepted critique of Obama is that his cool, detached and depersonalized style has cost him and the country dearly. No relationships with the Congress, White House-centric controls on agencies, and a lone wolf approach to running the country that doesn't work.

The ousting of three-term U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) from her seat in the U.S. Senate by U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) put the capper on the white Southern flip-flop from Democrat to Republican. The stock explanation for this change is race, gut there's another explanation for the GOP's lock on Southern whites that's every bit as compelling.

No grunt slogging through the jungles of Vietnam could imagine that in 2014, 41 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese would be welcoming back Americans as investors, tourists, advisers and protectors.

Some liken the Republican victory to a giant wave. However, when compared to historical elections involving the houses of congress, this win is more like spilling a glass of water. The following elections are the worst defeats of either Democrats or Republicans in the last 100 years.

Be afraid. Be VERY afraid! Of Ebola. Of ISIS. Of immigrants threatening to bring both threats across a porous border that can't be protected by a president who can't even protect his own house. Be afraid! Vote Republican.